OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Object Disentangling
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning in combination with improved training techniques and high computational power has led to recent advances in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) and to successful robotic RL applications such as in-hand manipulation. However, most robotic RL relies on a well known initial state distribution. In real-world tasks, this information is however often not available. For example, when disentangling waste objects the actual position of the robot w.r.t.\ the objects may not match the positions the RL policy was trained for. To solve this problem, we present a novel adversarial reinforcement learning (ARL) framework. The ARL framework utilizes an adversary, which is trained to steer the original agent, the protagonist, to challenging states. We train the protagonist and the adversary jointly to allow them to adapt to the changing policy of their opponent. We show that our method can generalize from training to test scenarios by training an end-to-end system for robot control to solve a challenging object disentangling task. Experiments with a KUKA LBR+ 7-DOF robot arm show that our approach outperforms the baseline method in disentangling when starting from different initial states than provided during training.
Cross-View Tracking for Multi-Human 3D Pose Estimation at over 100 FPS
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Estimating 3D poses of multiple humans in real-time is a classic but still challenging task in computer vision. Its major difficulty lies in the ambiguity in cross-view association of 2D poses and the huge state space when there are multiple people in multiple views. In this paper, we present a novel solution for multi-human 3D pose estimation from multiple calibrated camera views. It takes 2D poses in different camera coordinates as inputs and aims for the accurate 3D poses in the global coordinate. Unlike previous methods that associate 2D poses among all pairs of views from scratch at every frame, we exploit the temporal consistency in videos to match the 2D inputs with 3D poses directly in 3-space. More specifically, we propose to retain the 3D pose for each person and update them iteratively via the cross-view multi-human tracking. This novel formulation improves both accuracy and efficiency, as we demonstrated on widely-used public datasets. To further verify the scalability of our method, we propose a new large-scale multi-human dataset with 12 to 28 camera views. Without bells and whistles, our solution achieves 154 FPS on 12 cameras and 34 FPS on 28 cameras, indicating its ability to handle large-scale real-world applications. The proposed dataset is released at https://github.com/longcw/crossview_3d_pose_tracking.
Selecting and Designing Grippers for an Assembly Task in a Structured Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present a structured approach to selecting and designing a set of grippers for an assembly task. Compared to current experience-based gripper design method, our approach accelerates the design process by automatically generating a set of initial design options on gripper type and parameters according to the CAD models of assembly components. We use mesh segmentation techniques to segment the assembly components and fit the segmented parts with shape primitives, according to the predefined correspondence between primitive shape and gripper type, suitable gripper types and parameters can be selected and extracted from the fitted shape primitives. Moreover, we incorporate the assembly constraints in the further evaluation of the initially obtained gripper types and parameters. Considering the affordance of the segmented parts and the collision avoidance between the gripper and the subassemblies, applicable gripper types and parameters can be filtered from the initial options. Among the applicable gripper configurations, we further optimize number of grippers for performing the assembly task, by exploring the gripper that is able to handle multiple assembly components during the assembly. Finally, the feasibility of the designed grippers is experimentally verified by assembling a part of an industrial product.
Differentiate Everything with a Reversible Embeded Domain-Specific Language
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

Reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD) suffers from the issue of having too much space overhead to trace back intermediate computational states for back-propagation. The traditional method to trace back states is called checkpointing that stores intermediate states into a global stack and restore state through either stack pop or re-computing. The overhead of stack manipulations and re-computing makes the general purposed (not tensor-based) AD engines unable to meet many industrial needs. Instead of checkpointing, we propose to use reverse computing to trace back states by designing and implementing a reversible programming eDSL, where a program can be executed bi-directionally without implicit stack operations. The absence of implicit stack operations makes the program compatible with existing compiler features, including utilizing existing optimization passes and compiling the code as GPU kernels. We implement AD for sparse matrix operations and some machine learning applications to show that our framework has the state-of-the-art performance.
This PIN Can Be Easily Guessed: Analyzing the Security of Smartphone Unlock PINs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive study of user-chosen 4- and 6-digit PINs (n=1220) collected on smartphones with participants being explicitly primed for device unlocking. We find that against a throttled attacker (with 10, 30, or 100 guesses, matching the smartphone unlock setting), using 6-digit PINs instead of 4-digit PINs provides little to no increase in security, and surprisingly may even decrease security. We also study the effects of blocklists, where a set of "easy to guess" PINs is disallowed during selection. Two such blocklists are in use today by iOS, for 4-digits (274 PINs) as well as 6-digits (2910 PINs). We extracted both blocklists compared them with four other blocklists, including a small 4-digit (27 PINs), a large 4-digit (2740 PINs), and two placebo blocklists for 4- and 6-digit PINs that always excluded the first-choice PIN. We find that relatively small blocklists in use today by iOS offer little or no benefit against a throttled guessing attack. Security gains are only observed when the blocklists are much larger, which in turn comes at the cost of increased user frustration. Our analysis suggests that a blocklist at about 10% of the PIN space may provide the best balance between usability and security.
Explainable Agents Through Social Cues: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

The issue of how to make embodied agents explainable has experienced a surge of interest over the last three years, and, there are many terms that refer to this concept, e.g., transparency or legibility. One reason for this high variance in terminology is the unique array of social cues that embodied agents can access in contrast to that accessed by non-embodied agents. Another reason is that different authors use these terms in different ways. Hence, we review the existing literature on explainability and organize it by (1) providing an overview of existing definitions, (2) showing how explainability is implemented and how it exploits different social cues, and (3) showing how the impact of explainability is measured. Additionally, we present a list of open questions and challenges that highlight areas that require further investigation by the community. This provides the interested reader with an overview of the current state-of-the-art.
On the feasibility of automated prediction of bug and non-bug issues
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Context: Issue tracking systems are used to track and describe tasks in the development process, e.g., requested feature improvements or reported bugs. However, past research has shown that the reported issue types often do not match the description of the issue. Objective: We want to understand the overall maturity of the state of the art of issue type prediction with the goal to predict if issues are bugs and evaluate if we can improve existing models by incorporating manually specified knowledge about issues. Method: We train different models for the title and description of the issue to account for the difference in structure between these fields, e.g., the length. Moreover, we manually detect issues whose description contains a null pointer exception, as these are strong indicators that issues are bugs. Results: Our approach performs best overall, but not significantly different from an approach from the literature based on the fastText classifier from Facebook AI Research. The small improvements in prediction performance are due to structural information about the issues we used. We found that using information about the content of issues in form of null pointer exceptions is not useful. We demonstrate the usefulness of issue type prediction through the example of labelling bugfixing commits. Conclusions: Issue type prediction can be a useful tool if the use case allows either for a certain amount of missed bug reports or the prediction of too many issues as bug is acceptable.
ShieldDB: An Encrypted Document Database with Padding Countermeasures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The security of our data stores is underestimated in current practice, which resulted in many large-scale data breaches. To change the status quo, this paper presents the design of ShieldDB, an encrypted document database. ShieldDB adapts the searchable encryption technique to preserve the search functionality over encrypted documents without having much impact on its scalability. However, merely realising such a theoretical primitive suffers from real-world threats, where a knowledgeable adversary can exploit the leakage (aka access pattern to the database) to break the claimed protection on data confidentiality. To address this challenge in practical deployment, ShieldDB is designed with tailored padding countermeasures. Unlike prior works, we target a more realistic adversarial model, where the database gets updated continuously, and the adversary can monitor it at an (or multiple) arbitrary time interval(s). ShieldDB's padding strategies ensure that the access pattern to the database is obfuscated all the time. Additionally, ShieldDB provides other advanced features, including forward privacy, re-encryption, and flushing, to further improve its security and efficiency. We present a full-fledged implementation of ShieldDB and conduct intensive evaluations on Azure Cloud.
Evolution of diversity and dominance of companies in online activity
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Ever since the web began, the number of websites has been growing exponentially. These websites cover an ever-increasing range of online services that fill a variety of social and economic functions across a growing range of industries. Yet the networked nature of the web, combined with the economics of preferential attachment, increasing returns and global trade, suggest that over the long run a small number of competitive giants are likely to dominate each functional market segment, such as search, retail and social media. Here we perform a large scale longitudinal study to quantify the distribution of attention given in the online environment to competing organisations. In two large online social media datasets, containing more than 10 billion posts and spanning more than a decade, we tally the volume of external links posted towards the organisations' main domain name as a proxy for the online attention they receive. We also use the Common Crawl dataset -- which contains the linkage patterns between more than a billion different websites -- to study the patterns of link concentration over the past three years across the entire web. Lastly, we showcase the linking between economic, financial and market data by exploring the relationships between online attention on social media and the growth in enterprise value in the electric carmaker Tesla. Our analysis shows that despite the fact that we observe consistent growth in all the macro indicators -- the total amount of online attention, in the number of organisations with an online presence, and in the functions they perform -- we also observe that a smaller number of organisations account for an ever-increasing proportion of total user attention, usually with one large player dominating each function. These results highlight how evolution of the online economy involves innovation, diversity, and then competitive dominance.
Explaining Deep Neural Networks and Beyond: A Review of Methods and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With the broader and highly successful usage of machine learning in industry and the sciences, there has been a growing demand for Explainable AI. Interpretability and explanation methods for gaining a better understanding about the problem solving abilities and strategies of nonlinear Machine Learning, in particular, deep neural networks, are therefore receiving increased attention. In this work we aim to (1) provide a timely overview of this active emerging field, with a focus on 'post-hoc' explanations, and explain its theoretical foundations, (2) put interpretability algorithms to a test both from a theory and comparative evaluation perspective using extensive simulations, (3) outline best practice aspects i.e. how to best include interpretation methods into the standard usage of machine learning and (4) demonstrate successful usage of explainable AI in a representative selection of application scenarios. Finally, we discuss challenges and possible future directions of this exciting foundational field of machine learning.
Stop-and-Go: Exploring Backdoor Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Traffic Congestion Control Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Recent work has shown that the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in traffic could help reduce traffic jams. Deep reinforcement learning methods demonstrate good performance in complex control problems, including autonomous vehicle control, and have been used in state-of-the-art AV controllers. However, deep neural networks (DNNs) render automated driving vulnerable to machine learning-based attacks. In this work, we explore the backdooring/trojanning of DRL-based AV controllers. We develop a trigger design methodology that is based on well-established principles of traffic physics. The malicious actions include vehicle deceleration and acceleration to cause stop-and-go traffic waves to emerge (congestion attacks) or AV acceleration resulting in the AV crashing into the vehicle in front (insurance attack). We test our attack on single-lane and two-lane circuits. Our experimental results show that the backdoored model does not compromise normal operation performance, with the maximum decrease in cumulative rewards being 1%. Still, it can be maliciously activated to cause a crash or congestion when the corresponding triggers appear.
Localization Efficiency in Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In the next generation of wireless systems, Massive MIMO offers high angular resolution for localization. By virtue of large number of antennas, the Angle of Arrival (AoA) of User Terminals (UTs) can be estimated with high accuracy. According to Dense Multipath Component (DMC) channel model, local scatters around UTs can create different multipath signals for each antenna at the Base Station (BS). We obtain a deterministic form for the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) in a multi-user scenario when the contribution of the multipath signals is considered. We do this when the multipath signals are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) with arbitrary distribution. Then, we redefine a localization efficiency function for a multi-user scenario and numerically optimize it with respect to (w.r.t) the number of antennas. We prove when only a subset of the available antennas is used, CRLB can be minimized w.r.t which set of antennas is used. Then, an antenna selection strategy that minimizes CRLB is proposed. As a benchmark, we apply the proposed antenna selection scheme to the MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm and study its efficiency. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our analysis and show significant improvement in efficiency when the proposed antenna selection strategy is employed.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Through Transferring both the Source-Knowledge and Target-Relatedness Simultaneously
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is an emerging research topic in the field of machine learning and pattern recognition, which aims to help the learning of unlabeled target domain by transferring knowledge from the source domain.
Pre-trained Models for Natural Language Processing: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, the emergence of pre-trained models (PTMs) has brought natural language processing (NLP) to a new era. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of PTMs for NLP. We first briefly introduce language representation learning and its research progress. Then we systematically categorize existing PTMs based on a taxonomy with four perspectives. Next, we describe how to adapt the knowledge of PTMs to the downstream tasks. Finally, we outline some potential directions of PTMs for future research. This survey is purposed to be a hands-on guide for understanding, using, and developing PTMs for various NLP tasks.
Influence of CAV Clustering Strategies on Mixed Traffic Flow Characteristics: An Analysis of Vehicle Trajectory Data
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

Being one of the most promising applications enabled by connected and automated vehicles (CAV) technology, Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is expected to be deployed in the near term on public roads.} Thus far, the majority of the CACC studies have been focusing on the overall network performance with limited insights on the potential impacts of CAVs on human-driven vehicles (HVs).This paper aims to quantify such impacts by studying the high-resolution vehicle trajectory data that are obtained from microscopic simulation. Two platoon clustering strategies for CACC- an ad hoc coordination strategy and a local coordination strategy-are implemented. Results show that the local coordination outperforms the ad hoc coordination across all tested market penetration rates (MPRs) in terms of network throughput and productivity. According to the two-sample Kolmogorov-\textcolor{re}{Smirnov} test, however, the distributions of the hard braking events (as a potential safety impact) for HVs change significantly under local coordination strategy. For both of the clustering strategy, CAVs increase the average lane change frequency for HVs. The break-even point for average lane change frequency between the two strategies is observed at 30% MPR, which decreases from 5.42 to 5.38 per vehicle. The average lane change frequency following a monotonically increasing pattern in response to MPR, and it reaches the highest 5.48 per vehicle at 40% MPR. Lastly, the interaction state of the car-following model for HVs is analyzed. It is revealed that the composition of the interaction state could be influenced by CAVs as well. One of the apparent trends is that the time spent on approaching state declines with the increasing presence of CAVs.
Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning against Adversarial Perturbations on State Observations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent observes its states through observations, which may contain natural measurement errors or adversarial noises. Since the observations deviate from the true states, they can mislead the agent into making suboptimal actions. Several works have shown this vulnerability via adversarial attacks, but existing approaches on improving the robustness of DRL under this setting have limited success and lack for theoretical principles. We show that naively applying existing techniques on improving robustness for classification tasks, like adversarial training, is ineffective for many RL tasks. We propose the state-adversarial Markov decision process (SA-MDP) to study the fundamental properties of this problem, and develop a theoretically principled policy regularization which can be applied to a large family of DRL algorithms, including proximal policy optimization (PPO), deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and deep Q networks (DQN), for both discrete and continuous action control problems. We significantly improve the robustness of PPO, DDPG and DQN agents under a suite of strong white box adversarial attacks, including new attacks of our own. Additionally, we find that a robust policy noticeably improves DRL performance even without an adversary in a number of environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenhongge/StateAdvDRL.
TNT-KID: Transformer-based Neural Tagger for Keyword Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

With growing amounts of available textual data, development of algorithms capable of automatic analysis, categorization and summarization of these data has become a necessity. In this research we present a novel algorithm for keyword identification, i.e., an extraction of one or multi-word phrases representing key aspects of a given document, called Transformer-based Neural Tagger for Keyword IDentification (TNT-KID). By adapting the transformer architecture for a specific task at hand and leveraging language model pretraining on a domain specific corpus, the model is capable of overcoming deficiencies of both supervised and unsupervised state-of-the-art approaches to keyword extraction by offering competitive and robust performance on a variety of different datasets while requiring only a fraction of manually labeled data required by the best performing systems. This study also offers thorough error analysis with valuable insights into the inner workings of the model and an ablation study measuring the influence of specific components of the keyword identification workflow on the overall performance.
Green DetNet: Computation and Memory efficient DetNet using Smart Compression and Training
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper introduces an incremental training framework for compressing popular Deep Neural Network (DNN) based unfolded multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) detection algorithms like DetNet. The idea of incremental training is explored to select the optimal depth while training. To reduce the computation requirements or the number of FLoating point OPerations (FLOPs) and enforce sparsity in weights, the concept of structured regularization is explored using group LASSO and sparse group LASSO. Our methods lead to an astounding $98.9\%$ reduction in memory requirement and $81.63\%$ reduction in FLOPs when compared with DetNet without compromising on BER performance.
Active Interaction Force Control for Contact-Based Inspection with a Fully Actuated Aerial Vehicle
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents and validates active interaction force control and planning for fully actuated and omnidirectional aerial manipulation platforms, with the goal of aerial contact inspection in unstructured environments. We present a variable axis-selective impedance control which integrates direct force control for intentional interaction, using feedback from an on-board force sensor. The control approach aims to reject disturbances in free flight, while handling unintentional interaction, and actively controlling desired interaction forces. A fully actuated and omnidirectional tilt-rotor aerial system is used to show capabilities of the control and planning methods. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and force controlled interaction in different flight orientations. The system is validated as a tool for non-destructive testing of concrete infrastructure, and statistical results of